Making Lye From Wood Ashes

Turning hardwood ashes into homemade lye for soap or stripping animal hides is really easy and is just as effective as the commercially produced product. There is a difference in the two; homemade lye is Potassium Hydroxide (KOH) while commercial lye is Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) and you’ll need to keep that in mind if you are converting a soap recipe or making up a new one. Potassium Hydroxide, homemade lye, typically makes a softer soap, but personally I don’t think it’s all that noticeable if you’ve cooked it down to the correct strength and amend it with a little salt. To make homemade lye, you’ll need ashes from any hardwood tree or combination of trees (softwoods are too resinous), water and a suitable pot. There are several ways to leach the lye water from the ashes, but with all our animals and a 5 year old running around, we use a more contained method than the conventional warm water drip way. It’s just safer for everyone involved.

Getting started:

Utensils =

*Large pot that is either stainless steel, glass or has a porcelain coating. Lye water will corrode aluminum. I use one like this: Enamel Stock Pot , but before you drop $25 on a new one, surf around the junk shops. They usually have one or two that are too dinged to cook food in, but are perfect to designate as a lye pot. That’s were I got mine.

Long handle wooden spoon

Wooden or plastic ladle

Large glass jar to strain into

Coffee filters, loose weave muslin or cheesecloth

Rubber band to hold filter in place

Wooden skewer, chopstick, popsicle stick or something similar and a marking pen

A raw egg

Long sleeve clothes and/or rubber gloves

Ingredients =

Hardwood ashes

Water

**In this example, we used 24 cups of ash and 32 cups of water. Once finished, it produced a quart and a half of correct strength lye water. It doesn’t really matter how much you use, just make sure you start with an equal amount of ash and water then top off with enough water to give you about an inch more on the top.

1. In a well ventilated area, put the ashes and water into the pot and bring it up to a boil. You will need to stir almost continually to keep the ashes from forming into a thick layer in the bottom of the pot. It’s important to stir carefully and not slosh the lye water. It’s not in near full strength form yet, but is still something to be respected. Once it reaches boiling, turn off the heat and let it sit until cool. I periodically stir mine while it’s cooling, but I’m not sure if that actually helps the strength of it or not.

2. When the mixture is cool, use a ladle (wooden or plastic) to carefully dip out the water in the top of the pot. Take care not to disturb the settled ashes too much and you won’t have a ton of junk to strain out later.

3. Place your coffee filter, muslin or cheesecloth over the mouth of a large jar (I use a gallon jar) and secure it with the rubber band. Make sure you have a significant amount of the filter hanging down inside the jar. Carefully ladle the lye water into the jar. You will have to ladle it instead of pouring because it will take a while to seep through, especially if using a coffee filter or piece of muslin. You will also probably need to do more than one batch to filter all the water.

4. Once you’ve filtered all the lye water and discarded the left over ash, rinse the pot out well and put the filtered lye water back in. If you’re like us and have animals free-ranging, you may want to bury the left over ash to keep everyone out of it. Some of our animals are smart enough to stay out of it, and others I’m not so sure of. 🙂

5. Using the stick, mark the height of the water, then mark a 1/2 way point and a 1/4 way point. You will need these markings to know when to test the strength of the lye.

6. Simmer the lye water to reduce it, periodically checking the level with your marked stick. Once the water has been reduced to 1/4, carefully dip out a couple of cups and let it cool. Once the lye water is cool, use your stirring spoon to place the raw egg into the lye water. If the lye is the correct strength, the egg will float enough to have a quarter size spot of it above the water line. If it doesn’t have a quarter’s worth showing, remove the egg and return the lye water back to the pot to reduce some more. You can reuse the egg as many times as you need until it floats correctly, but be sure to discard it once your done, it’s no longer safe to eat.

When you’ve finished, keep your lye water in a glass or ceramic jar, using plastic wrap to keep the lye from having contact with any aluminum parts of the lid. As you can see below, you’ll have significantly less in the end that you did when you started!

The lye water keeps well, I’ve kept it for a full year and had good soap from it. Also be SURE to label it REALLY well. I used the jars here to be able to show the end volume, but it’s better to keep it in something that won’t be as easily mistaken for food by someone who doesn’t know what it is. It looks very similar to chicken broth. Dirty chicken broth… but all the same, it’s better to be safe than sorry. You could also continue reducing it until you have crystals that you would reconstitute with water, but I have only tried that once and the lye gets quite volatile.

Update on 12/9/16: For anyone who is interested, the wood ash lye soap recipe has been posted, finally! 🙂 You can find it here: Make Your Own Wood Ash Lye Soap

Comments

Hey Stephanie! I apologize for just now seeing this, we’ve passed the flu around and I’m so behind! I need to think on this a bit, but one of my first thoughts would be the heat when you first combine the lye and tallow. Let me re-read your question a few times to get my thoughts in order and I’ll see what I can do to help! Ann 🙂

Thank you for posting this! I am trying to make this soap at home. I did what you said for the lye water and I got my egg to float. However, when I mix the lye water with tallow, it seems to trace almost immediately and then it separates into the “rice” look. I tried it twice with different levels of heat, and the same thing happened both times just at different speeds (it happened slower when I turned the heat down). The second time when I tried it with the heat down, it was very very low. The first time it seemed to be too hot – the tracing happened almost instantly. Or at least my lye water was too cool compared to the warmed up melted tallow. So the second time I did it at extremely low heat, it took about 5 minutes to trace, and then it separated. Got any ideas? Any chance my lye water is not concentrated enough? Could my lye water be the source problem? I did try reheating both batches and stirring for HOURS – like 4 hours – and nothing changed the whole time. It just kept looking like rice in brown liquid…

Thanks for sharing your information! I too would like to see the recipe that you use for the soap, either single bar or multiple bars. I’m just getting started making soap and want to be able to do it all from scratch eventually.

Hey Kirsten! You can put this into any soap calculator as KOH. I had to play around with it a bit in small batches before I was happy with the final product. It gets a little tricky trying to get the proportions correct since it’s already liquid, not granules that many calculators work of off. I’ve got my final version written down thinking I’d share it in a post, but since that’s taken me more than two years, I probably should just find it and put it here in the comments, lol. I’ve also got a single bar size recipe that is convenient if you want to experiment with adding fresh herbs, etc. I’ll see if I can get them both up on this comment thread. Also, the type of wood will make a clear difference in the final hardness of the soap too. Depending on what we’ve been burning, I may have a good bar batch that is barely distinguishable from NaOH bars, other times it’s the consistency that requires it to be “jar” soap. We just use it however it turns out. 🙂 Also, if you do hot process, let it sit for a few weeks to dry as if it’s cold process and that will help the hardness. 🙂

Oh, hi there!

We are a small, traditional values family living on 85 acres in an underground passive solar house in the beautiful rolling hills of North Carolina. Our lifestyle is one of living off the land and utilizing "lost skills" that were once commonplace. We grow a good portion of our own food, forage for wild edibles, hunt, raise livestock and preserve the things we harvest. We cook on an old fashioned kitchen woodstove and have foregone the trend of solar power and generators because of the dependence on batteries and fuel that must be obtained commercially. Instead we have chosen to position ourselves to live without electricity if necessary. By simplifying, we have carved out a lifestyle that enables us to be self-sufficient, live off the land, and enjoy the solitude that comes with being somewhat "out-of sync" with the rest of the world.

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